02 November 2000

The Redoubt of the Soul

Our technology is about to give us the power to change human nature. If
we do, then what happens to Natural Law as a basis for public policy?
And will we even care?

Modern science and technology are 300 years young, willful
adolescents running away on legs of internetworked computers. Because
their parents, the philosophers and theologians, have remained largely
ignorant of them, they are stumbling without moral guidance into hiding
places of the human soul. How they may transform human nature must give
us pause.

At the most superficial level, they will transform human
knowledge. The internet will soon give nearly everyone instant access to
the world’s knowledge. At the same time, computers are shrinking from
laptops to palmtops to miniature belt-glove-glasses-and-earphones
affairs worn by computer engineering students who call themselves
"cyborgs." Access to knowledge is becoming not only instant, but
constant, which is changing the very meaning of knowledge. Printing
changed knowledge from memorization to remembering where something was
written. The web is changing knowledge into knowing how to ask questions
— how find out what you want without finding all the stuff you don’t.

To assist in this quest entrepreneurs are now selling
"intelligent agents," software robots that roam the web in search of
just the relevant bits of information. As computers and programming
techniques grow more powerful, librarians and even teachers may be
replaced by intelligent agents that guide each child into mastery of its
computer enhanced world. The risk is that the "agents" will construct a
biased view of human knowledge — biased by software writers, their
employers, or their governments — of which the users are unaware. Even
if such biases can be managed, and if users can maintain some
commonality of worldview despite fragmenting into non-interacting online
communities, the existential risk is the despair that comes from having
knowledge without meaning.

Imagine being able to know any fact that has been discovered,
but having no reason to know anything at all. Remember that Albert Camus
in his Myth of Sisyphus proved that life without reference to
God is absurd. He found meaning by reveling in absurdity, but that is
cold comfort for the mass of humanity. To make the limit of human
knowledge accessible to everyone, but without a sense of purpose, of
destiny — of anything beyond — is to invite decadence, decline and
despair.

Computer networks may also transform human communication. Even
now a laptop computer gives voice to the paralyzed physicist Stephen
Hawking. If neurologists seeking to "cure" blindness have their way,
then computers may transform from wearable to implantable and interact
directly with one’s visual cortex. That is, if scientists can ever
understand the workings of the brain well enough for them to enable a
computer to put images directly into the visual cortex, enabling a
person to "see" without eyes, then they will be able to make a computer
take images directly from the cortex as well. Add wireless
computer-to-computer networking to this capability, and we have the
possibility of people being able to transmit their mental imagery
directly into each other’s brain. The same might be true for the
auditory cortex, and other parts of the brain as well (including, for a
doubtless illicit fee, its pleasure centers).

Using implanted computers and wireless networks, each person
may someday be able to connect his or her mind directly to all the
world’s knowledge and the minds of all the world’s people, even the
recorded thoughts of the post-twenty-first century dead. If
computer-enhanced people gain the ability to communicate by thought
itself, speech as a time series of symbols (words) may disappear. People
might communicate by exchanging much richer content, such as daydreams,
instead. And if words disappear, so will all the world’s previous
literature, including its scriptures.

As if transforming knowledge and communication were not enough,
genetic engineering may transform our bodies and minds. People may want
their children to be taller, more athletic, or smarter, and humanity
may acquire the techniques to make them so. But genes tend to travel in
groups, which means altering one gene may have unintended consequences.
Just as breeding dogs for large size compromised their longevity,
breeding kids for high IQ or some other cognitive ability may compromise
them emotionally or spiritually. As a trivial example, suppose humanity
decides to give itself the genes to sense one’s orientation and
location continuously, like homing pigeons. How would a Christian
Fundamentalist witness about being "saved" to those who are incapable of
experiencing or imagining being "lost"? How will humanity sense the
despair of having knowledge without meaning if it’s brains are
genetically engineered to feel just fine?

Finally I must point out a consequence of John Archibald
Wheeler’s realization that the Universe is pervaded by a "quantum foam"
made up of so-called zero-point (or vacuum) oscillations of space-time
itself. These oscillations take place on a scale so tiny that sub-atomic
particles like protons and neutrons would seem enormous in comparison.
Moreover, the intensity of these tiny oscillations is so great that a
proton passing by would seem not only large, but insubstantial, like a
vast cloud. Indeed, Wheeler and others have hypothesized that sub-atomic
particles may be no more that standing patterns of these space-time
oscillations. Now if quantum oscillations of empty space-time can be
organized into standing patterns that comprise solid matter, might they
not also be organized into other, less detectable, standing patterns
that support some aspects of our consciousness? If so, then some future
science may enable us to manipulate aspects of our souls.

Whether or not this last possibility is ever realized, one
thing is certain: in the coming centuries human nature will be subject
to unprecedented forces of change. Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of 3001
may have been too timid — people a millennium hence might seem alien to
us if we could meet them, and we might seem subhuman to them. How in
the midst of such change are we to preserve our human nature? How are we
to affirm that we should do so? How shall we even answer the question,
"What is our human nature?"

Scientific naturalism can give only trivial answers to the
latter question. Human is what carries the human genome. But will we
still be human if we change that genome? Scientific naturalism will only
be able to ascertain our ability to breed with unaltered humans, if
there are any left. To the questions of whether and how to preserve our
human nature, scientific naturalism gives no answer at all. Scientific
naturalism, which is no more than unaided reason, gives knowledge
without meaning, technique without teleology.

Hence we must turn to faith. We take it on faith that we must
preserve and build on our essential human-ness, rather than undermine
it. We find that, as in the title of the feminist health manual, Our Bodies, Our Selves,
what we collectively do to our material bodies, we do to our spiritual
selves. The theological-moral debates over sexuality, fertility control,
abortion, euthanasia, and execution are the first skirmishes of the
gathering battle for human nature. People of faith, both liberal and
conservative, must consider their participation in these debates not
only in the context of keeping the commandments so as to build a wall
around the scriptures, but of using ethics to build a fortress around
human nature, a redoubt for the soul.

The core question in all these debates has been, "Is human life
an essential good, or only a contingent good, to be discarded under
certain circumstances when unwanted?" The value we place on human life
ultimately reflects the value we place on human nature. If we devalue a
violent criminal so much that we permit ourselves to execute him or her,
will we devalue aggression so much that we engineer away part of our
drive for achievement? If we devalue our fetuses so much that we perform
abortion until the end of pregnancy, will we devalue childhood
dependency so much that we engineer away part of our capacity to love?

In these and other debates, people of faith will steer
humanity’s voyage into the 3rd millennium. The more conservative will
witness against certain kinds of change by preserving traditional ways
of being human. They will become God’s sea-anchor to slow humanity’s
(and liberal religion’s) tendency to drift toward an abyss of
meaninglessness. The more liberal faithful will witness within the
changing culture, and become God’s rudder to guide its transformations.
They will translate scripture into whatever form is necessary for it to
remain a living cultural reality. The future may yet be bright.

For if our future is fraught with risk, it also brings hope.
Consider that if people become enabled to exchange their thoughts and
sensations, it may be more difficult to harm one’s neighbor. "I feel
your pain," may become transformed from a political platitude to an
immediate sensation. Thus, if the Word of God ceases to be written in
our books, it may be because it will become written on our hearts.

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I'm a Christian and a retired weapons scientist, vocations which have sensitized me to some of the ways in which the world is dangerously insane. So, on 4 July 1996 I founded the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, which is moving to this blog.